Darktrace, a global leader in cyber security artificial intelligence, is pleased to announce two of the company’s Cyber and Industrial Cyber Products have been nominated to compete in the 2022 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program.

Darktrace RESPOND (Formerly Darktrace Antigena)

Every other cyber company learns from historical attack data to stop known attacks from getting inside an organization.

This approach doesn’t work against advanced or novel threats.

Acting as an Enterprise Immune System, Darktrace learns each organization’s ‘digital DNA.’ Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI doesn’t rely on historical data.

Instead, it analyzes and determines ‘normal’ behaviors for users and devices across a digital estate.

By evolving its understanding to learn the businesses, not the breach, Darktrace is fundamentally different from other vendors.

(See how Darktrace’s Autonomous Response technology fights back in seconds, and more. Courtesy of Darktrace and YouTube.)

Through its Autonomous Response technology Darktrace RESPOND, Darktrace’s AI uses this understanding to identify anomalous behavior and interrupt attacks in real-time before they escalate into a crisis and disrupt business operations.

This is the only technology of its kind. From internet-connected machinery to email, endpoints, and SaaS applications, Darktrace can protect the entire business, wherever data lives.

Darktrace RESPOND can enforce normal 24/7, whether the organization experiences an out-of-hours ransomware attack or an insider exfiltrating sensitive data. Darktrace globally responds to a threat every three seconds.

Darktrace RESPOND can defend any technology in any environment. With coverage areas ranging from network to the cloud to email and SaaS, Darktrace RESPOND continues to augment the world’s ability to respond to complex and novel cyber-attacks.

With the critical visibility allowed by Self-learning AI, this autonomous response technology has recently been extended to protect endpoints and better integrate with Zero Trust architectures through partnerships with Microsoft and AWS.

According to Darktrace, there are no other cyber vendors capable of defending the range of environments covered by Darktrace RESPOND.

Darktrace RESPOND intercepts complex, multi-step ransomware attacks, combatting malicious activity at machine speed, anywhere within an enterprise.

(From the initial phishing email through to encryption of devices, see through a hypothetical attack scenario highlighting how Darktrace RESPOND (formerly Antigena) neutralizes an intrusion using Autonomous Response technology. Courtesy of Darktrace and YouTube.)

In the wake of the ransomware breach of Colonial Pipeline, Darktrace protects customers from similarly damaging attacks across all 16 critical infrastructure sectors designated by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Here are some real-world examples from Darktrace’s over 6,800 customers.

Last year, Darktrace RESPOND defended all customers when REvil, the ransomware group said to be behind the attack on Colonial Pipeline, exploited a vulnerability in Kaseya software. Darktrace prevented attackers from encrypting data or disrupting the critical software supply chain.

The newly established Darktrace Federal division continues to prioritize this mandate of cyber-defense across U.S. government institutions and organizations operating critical infrastructure.

At the end of 2021, Darktrace protected against increased insider threats resulting from ‘the Great Resignation.’ While many employee resignations were not malicious, the risk of data leaks, compromised workers, and unrecovered devices concerned security teams.

Darktrace RESPOND protects against these threats by understanding ‘normal’ for each employee and endpoint device across an organization’s entire digital infrastructure and responding to anything outside of that normal.

As cyber-attacks get faster, more advanced, and more automated, security teams are overwhelmed and outpaced.

Autonomous Response changes the stakes for defenders by giving security teams the ability to contain fast-moving threats, even when they are not in the office or online and cannot respond fast enough.

Darktrace’s AI does not replace human security teams – it augments them, giving them greater resources to focus on strategic tasks. It helps businesses make micro-decisions so humans can focus on higher priority responsibilities.

Darktrace DETECT/OT (formerly Industrial Immune System)

Cyber-attacks present one of the most pressing issues of our times – and it’s not just businesses that are impacted.

The increase in cyber-attacks from both cyber-criminals and nation-state actors also jeopardizes the critical infrastructure and utilities on which society relies, presenting real-world threats to economic and national security.

As we saw from the recent attack on Colonial Pipeline, attacks now run at machine speed, outpacing human security teams’ ability to detect and respond to malicious activity.

Overwhelmed security teams can no longer keep up with the speed of cyber-attacks that threaten to shut down power grids and disrupt how we work.

The boundaries of modern-day businesses are blurred, particularly with the convergence of IT and OT/ICS technologies due to increased remote working in industrial and manufacturing environments.

Security teams in this space must defend an increasingly complex attack surface because of rapid digital transformation and an explosion in IoT.

The legacy security tools traditionally present in ICS environments do not go far enough to defend this complex attack surface from the increasingly disruptive, machine-speed attacks on critical infrastructure.

It is often impossible to mitigate security risks with the decades-old equipment in environments like long-standing nuclear power plants, and it won’t be replaced any time soon.

CISOs don’t need more lists of things to fix; they need businesses, power plants, and other critical infrastructure to be self-resilient and effectively protected.

For organizations operating critical infrastructure across all 16 sectors designated by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Darktrace DETECT/OT uses Self-learning AI to fill this critical gap.

Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI offers security teams a breadth of contextual understanding and visibility, autonomously identifying and mitigating against these risks rather than just alerting these organizations that they are vulnerable.

At its core, Darktrace DETECT/OT exists to deliver AI-powered technology that can autonomously defend these organizations that humans depend on in daily life from sophisticated, stealthy, and machine-speed cyber-attacks.

This immune system technology uses Self-learning AI to understand ‘normal’ behavior for each unique business, detect anomalous events or behaviors, and build a robust and bespoke cyber-defense based on enforcing this ‘normal.”

(Learn how Darktrace DETECT/OT (formerly Darktrace Industrial Immune System) platform protects organizations around the clock, protecting the entire dynamic workforce across cloud and SaaS, email, IoT, endpoints and the corporate network. Darktrace AI provides a unified view over all environments, leveraging machine learning technology to autonomously detect, investigate and respond to cyber-threats in real time, no matter where or when they appear. Courtesy of Darktrace and YouTube.)

Whether Darktrace has seen the attack before, its AI fights back, making important decisions efficiently and at machine speed.

Customers are always protected even if Darktrace encounters a brand-new, novel attack where the response couldn’t possibly have been pre-programmed.

This AI empowers employees to focus on what they do best and enables executives to bring in innovative, emerging technologies while the business remains safe and secure.

Today, this ability for the machine to fight back is, on average, stopping ransomware within one second of detecting threatening activity.

By stopping threats in their tracks, companies using Darktrace self-learning AI do not have to shut down systems for days on end and do not have to pay hefty ransoms to criminals.

Recently, at an integrated oil refiner and supplier, Darktrace DETECT/OT technology was critical in stopping a ransomware attack that originated in the corporate network.

Darktrace identified the first signs of this ransomware infection in a desktop device on the network and discovered the device writing its own ransom note files and making a series of connections to rare external destinations via an internal proxy server.

Darktrace also found the device downloading potentially malicious files and making several SMB directory queries.

Self-learning AI detected and correlated these activities as abnormal based on its granular knowledge of ‘normal’ for the organization and this particular device.

Darktrace DETECT/OT flagged this activity and highlighted it as likely ransomware, alerting the customer’s security team before the infection could spread into the OT environment.

With Self-learning AI’s ability to connect patterns across diverse infrastructure, Darktrace defended the industrial system from this machine-speed attack.

Because of Darktrace, the customer avoided the level of disruption and reputational damage seen in the recent cyber-attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS.

Darktrace believes that no organization is invulnerable to this new era of cyber-attacks.

Self-learning AI technology protects over 6,800 organizations – from renewable energy suppliers to education and healthcare providers – letting them focus on their respective goals.

Darktrace’s technology sets it apart from not only every other cybersecurity solution on the market today but also from other approaches to AI. Darktrace is on a mission to free the world of cyber disruption.

Breakthrough innovations in their Cyber AI Research Centre in Cambridge, UK, have resulted in over 100 patents filed and research published to contribute to the cyber security community.

Rather than study attacks, Darktrace technology continuously learns and updates its knowledge of ‘you’ and applies that understanding to optimize your state of optimal cyber security, to deliver Cyber AI Loop; fuelling a continuous end-to-end security capability that can autonomously spot and respond to novel in-progress threats within seconds.

Darktrace, named one of TIME magazine’s ‘Most Influential Companies’ in 2021, employs over 2,000 people worldwide and protects more than 7,400 customers globally from advanced cyber threats. Darktrace was

To learn more, please visit darktrace.com.

Darktrace Nominated to Compete for Two 2022 ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards

American Security Today’s Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards is the preeminent U.S. Homeland Security Awards Program, and now entering it’s Seventh Year, continues to recognize industry leaders of Physical and Border Security, Cybersecurity, Emergency Preparedness – Management and Response, Law Enforcement, First Responders, as well as federal, state and municipal government agencies in the acknowledgment of their outstanding efforts to Keep our Nation Secure.

The Annual ‘ASTORS’ Awards highlight the most cutting-edge and forward-thinking security solutions coming onto the market today, to ensure our readers have the information they need to stay ahead of the competition and keep our Nation safe – one facility, street, and city at a time.